Well, after trying this, something has gone kaboom on my system. I can no longer compile anything, at all. It complains that, essentially, gcc can not compile anything. Switching to an older version of gcc does not help either._________________Want Free games?
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Added this LDFLAGS="-Wl,-O1" to /etc/make.conf
and recomiled Thunderbird.
Before it took 7-10 sec to start and now it took 7 sec to start for the first time and 3!!!!! sec to start any time after that, I guess it takes a long time to cashe the binary.
This is great, going to do an "emerge -e system", and post the results when it's done:-)

Added this LDFLAGS="-Wl,-O1" to /etc/make.conf
and recomiled Thunderbird.
Before it took 7-10 sec to start and now it took 7 sec to start for the first time and 3!!!!! sec to start any time after that, I guess it takes a long time to cashe the binary.
This is great, going to do an "emerge -e system", and post the results when it's done:-)

Replayng to myself
"emerge -e system" spited some error, but just as I was going to post it (e.g copy/paste), the power whent down
Is there some log file that the error might have been loged?

To those having problems (charlieg and planetsheinker), can you be more descriptive in what has gone wrong so people can assist you?

charlieg: I haven't heard of anyone breaking their system yet with LDFLAGS="-Wl,-O1". I don't know about any of the other flags. The worst that I've heard happen is a package won't compile.

planetsheinker: You'll have to rerun the emerge again for the failed package to get the error message. You can however get an idea by going to /var/tmp/portage/ and looking in the package directory. When a package fails, I believe it keeps a /work/ directory open? I might be wrong, but if you go into that /work/ directory, and type "make" it should reproduce the error.

Wee! I feel compelled to reply since I got my new install up and running (had a few easily solved Grub issues). I've bootstrapped and done the entire install as ~x86 with LDFLAGS="-Wl,-O1" and all is fine. Maybe it's just placebo...maybe it's just the faster hard disk, but things seem a lot snappier.